The First 3 Lessons

You may be a product manager or a product owner. Whatever the specific title is, your task is to ensure that a product is built and maintained successfully. What are the top three things to always keep in mind in order to be effective at your role?

Number one

Ask the question what would ____ do or want in this situation. Fill in the blank with (1) what would my customer do or want. (2) What would the competitor do or want. We always forget about competition and it becomes an afterthought. It's important to keep your competition in check always. Finally (3) what would the market do or want.

You may be an expert on your product or you may know your product to the Nth degree . But try to understand which of your product features are wanted by your customers and which of your product features are important to your customers. I have seen product managers and engineers alike being hung up on small details which customers may not even care. People miss this point even when building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). 

Number two

Be descriptive but not prescriptive. Capture the why but not the how! Especially if you have come from engineering, you can't help yourself from telling the engineers what to do. While this is good for smaller problems, try to avoid it. You are development team an opportunity to explain how they want to come to the conclusion. 

As a product manager, you are soon going to find yourself very busy trying to tackle multiple things. One way to delegate is to always focus on the bigger picture and the vision. Set the goals and let the team take it from there.

Number three

You don't need to finish everything in your backlog. If it wasn't important enough in the last 4 sprints, chances are it ain't important enough now. This is not always the case, but use it as a rule of thumb. You are missing out on key features that the market need if you are keep going back to clean sweep the backlog.